Ebola Outbreak in DRC Kills 2,325 of 4,945 Confirmed Cases As of August 17

The current outbreak is driven by the Bundibugyo variant, for which no vaccine or specific treatment is currently available. Tom Fletcher, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, said on August 14 that the virus kills one person every 30 minutes. The DRC declared its 17th Ebola epidemic on May 15, with a delay of several weeks, in northern and eastern regions where state presence is fragile and health infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle the surge in cases.

The outbreak has already spread to six provinces of this vast Central African country of more than 100 million inhabitants, where population movements largely escape surveillance. In three months, seven times more cases and five times more deaths have been recorded in the DRC than during the first three months of the largest Ebola epidemic in history, which hit West Africa in 2014, according to the African Union's health agency.